Friday, 30 September 2016

The Theology of Christian Marriage

Marriage: an Orthodox view

The Orthodox Church understands
marriage as a holy mystery (sacrament); the union of two human persons,
one male and the other female, as a sign of the love of Christ for the
Church, fulfilled in the Kingdom of God. There can be no such thing as a
homosexual marriage.[1]

1 Introduction

Christian theologians do not
seem to have paid very much attention to marriage in the past. There
have not been such clearly worked out dogmatic definitions for marriages
as there have been, for example, in Christology.

In Christology, however, until
the First Ecumenical Council (Nicaea, 325) there were also not such
clearly articulated dogmas concerning the nature of Christ. It was only
when the divinity of Christ was questioned by Arius that the need was
felt for a clearer statement, and it was one of our own African bishops,
St Athanasius the Great, who helped to formulate the Nicene Creed that
was produced by the council. And it took several more councils before we
had the doctrinal statement, the Symbol of Faith we have today.

As in the time of Arius and
Athanasius, the nature of marriage is being questioned today, and so
there needs to be a more carefully-worded and clearly worked out
statement of the theology of marriage. This paper is not such a
statement. This paper is merely an attempt to draw together some strands
of what the Orthodox Church has taught about marriage up till now.

2 The theology of marriage

The Orthodox Church’s understanding of marriage is primarily ontological and sacramental, not juridical.

The Orthodox sacrament of holy
matrimony does not carry the meaning of a legal contract. By considering
the institution of marriage as a legal contract, one begins the process
of transforming the whole sacrament into a juridical issue, and
transforming the Church into a mundane legislator.

Consequently, it eliminates the
principles of love and grace which make love grow immeasurably. It also
emphasizes the concept of ownership, which is encompassed in the concept
of contract.

Though marriage often has a legal and juridical aspect, that is not the starting point for a discussion of what marriage is.

2.1 The anthropology of marriage

The starting point for
understanding marriage can be seen in Mark 10:27, when the Pharisees
came to our Lord Jesus Christ and asked him about the lawfulness of
divorce. In other words, it was a juridical and legal question. But
Jesus does not answer the question in a juridical and legal manner, but
rather in an ontological one: “But from the beginning God made them male
and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and
cleave to his wife.”

Our Lord Jesus Christ was
referring to two passages from the beginning of Genesis. “So God created
man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and
female created he them” (Gen 1:27) and “And Adam said, This is now bone
of my bones, flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she
was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his
mother and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Gen
2:23-24).

According to the Scriptures,
therefore, God did not start by making an individual, but a community, a
marriage. “It is not good for man to be alone” so God made man male and
female. There is a Zulu proverb that illustrates this: Umuntu ungumuntu
ngabantu — a person is a person because of people.[2]

In making man male and female, God deliberately creates sexuality.
The author of Genesis knew the difference between a cow and a bull, but
did not see fit to mention this sexual difference when describing the
creation of cattle. This is because man can debase sexuality in a way
that cattle cannot. Man can treat sexuality as something alien and
hostile, as an invention of demons, as many gnostics did. It is also
noteworthy that having made the sexual distinction in man at creation,
God makes no other distinction. There is no distinction between Greek
man and Jewish man, black man and white man. There is only man, male and
female.

Male and female are not
interchangeable. There is a unity and a difference; male man is
incomplete without female man; female man is incomplete without male
man. Western culture tends to deride and devalue this complementarity
and the need for community. There was a saying that was common a few
years back that illustrates this: “A woman without a man is like a fish
without a bicycle”. This rejects the idea of “bone of my bone, flesh of
my flesh”. Denying the complementarity, however, is like saying that
having two left feet is the same as having a left foot and a right foot.

In all this we are considering
marriage from an ontological and anthropological point of view. This is
what human beings are. This is what God made man to be; not alone, but
longing for the other, different yet the same.

In human history, marriage has
taken many forms. In some societies there have been polygamous
marriages, and polygamy has been seen as normal. This has very often
been caused by the mode of production. When economic circumstances
change, the pattern of marriage changes. But in discussing creation the
authors of Genesis, even though they themselves lived in polygamous
societies, described the ideal of marriage, the God-intended form of
marriage, as the marriage of one male person with one female person.

2.2 Marriage as a sacrament

The anthropological and
ontological view of marriage looks at what marriage is, as a human
institution. There have been various laws and customs in different
societies that have applied to marriage. But the legal and social
dimensions of marriage do not determine what marriage is.

What of Christian marriage? Or a specifically Christian understanding of marriage?

We do not even remember today
that marriage is, as everything else in “this world,” a fallen and
distorted marriage, and that it needs not to be blessed and “solemnized”
– after a rehearsal and with the help of the photographer – but
restored. This restoration, furthermore, is in Christ and this means His
life, death resurrection and ascension to heaven, in the pentecostal
inauguration of the “new eon,” in the Church as the sacrament of all
this. Needless to say, this restoration infinitely transcends the idea
of the “Christian family,” and gives marriage cosmic and universal
dimensions (Schmemann 1982:82).

The Christian understanding of
marriage, therefore, is primarily in relation to the Eucharist, which is
the sacrament of all these things. In the early Church there was no
separate marriage ceremony. Married couples brought their life together
into the Church by participating together in the Eucharist. The
development of a separate marriage service is basically an extension of
this.

2.2.1 The marriage service

The Orthodox marriage service is in two parts: the Betrothal and the Crowning.

The Betrothal, in which the main
feature is the exchange of rings, normally takes place in the narthex
of the temple. It represents the natural marriage, marriage as a human
institution, Even in Western Christian marriage rites, in the past the
custom was for marriage to take place at the church door or porch.

The prayers mention the
betrothal of Isaac and Rebecca, and the priest, after blessing the
rings, makes the sign of the cross over each of the parties three times,
saying that “The servant of God N is betrothed to the servant of God M,
in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

The priest then puts the bride’s ring on the bridegroom’s right hand, and the bridegroom’s ring on the bride’s right hand.

This concludes the betrothal. Unlike Western marriage services, there is no exchange of vows, no legal contact that is ended by death “till death us do part”.

The priest then leads the couple
into the nave of the church, to the singing of a psalm, and the
crowning service takes place in front of the royal doors, with more
prayers. The crowns are placed on the heads of the bridegroom and bride,
and, in some traditions, exchanged between them either by the priest or
by the best man.

The crowning expresses the
distinctively Christian and sacramental aspect of marriage. The priest
says “Crown them with glory and honour”, which recalls Psalm 8, and also
Hebrews 2, in which the Psalm is quoted. This refers to fallen man
restored to fellowship with God in Christ, and restored to rightful
dominion over the earth. The couple are to be king and queen to each
other, and their life together is to be a witness (martyria) to the
kingdom of God, a little kingdom, and a little church, a cell of the
Body of Christ. And so the crowns are also martyrs crowns, and this is
referred to in the song that is sung as they circle the analogion three
times anticlockwise:

Rejoice O Isaiah, a virgin is with child

And shall bear a Son Emmanuel

He is both God and man

And Orient is his name.

Magnifying him, we call the virgin blessed.

O holy martyrs

Who fought the good fight

and have received your crowns

entreat the Lord God

that he will have mercy upon our souls.

Glory to Thee, O Christ God

The apostles’ boast, the martyrs’ joy

Whose preaching was the consubstantial Trinity.

Christian marriage, therefore,
is to be a sign and a witness of the restoration of marriage, and of
mankind and all creation from their fallen state, and to be restored to
fellowship and communion with God. The love of the married couple for
each other must overflow as a witness of the love of God. So Christian
marriage, as expressed in the crowning, is to transform the fallen human
institution of marriage itself, and also to participate in the
transformation of the fallen world.

The marriage is not simply
between the couple themselves, but there is a third person present,
Christ Himself. If their life together is to be a “little church”, then
it cannot be without Christ who said “without me you can do nothing”. So
everything in the service is done in threes: the rings and crowns are
blessed three times, and the Dance of Isaiah is a triple circling of the
analogion. And their marriage is a preaching without words, a preaching
whose content, like that of the apostles and martyrs, is the
consubstantial Trinity.

One of the primary features of
their witness (martyria) will be that if God blesses them with children,
they will bring up their children in the knowledge and fear of the
Lord.

Holy Matrimony is a sacrament
indeed, because through marriage the Kingdom of God becomes a living
experience, in the midst of the Eucharistic community. In the Body of
Christ the husband and wife can become the flesh of each other in a way
unique to the measure of the unity of Christ and His Church. Sacramental
marriage is like other marriages, but it does not belong to this world
in its content and experience. Holy matrimony is a testimony to God and a
way toward theosis, a way toward eternity (Fr. Michel Najim).

Fr Alexander Schmemann (1982:88) also points out what marriage is not:

We can now understand that
its true meaning is not that it merely gives a religious “sanction” to
marriage and family life, reinforces with supernatural grace the natural
family virtues. Its meaning is that by taking the “natural” marriage
into “the great mystery of Christ and the Church,” the sacrament of
matrimony gives marriage a new meaning; it transforms, in fact, not only
marriage as such, but all human love…

For the Christian, natural
does not mean either self-sufficient – a “nice little family” – or
merely insufficient, and to be, therefore, strengthened and completed by
the addition of the “supernatural.” The natural man thirsts and hungers
for fulfillment and redemption. This thirst and hunger is the vestibule
of the Kingdom: both beginning and exile.

2.3 Marriage, virginity and celibacy

We have seen that the sexual
distinction in man is one made by God in creation. God made man male and
female, and sexuality is therefore not something intrinsically evil.
But, like many other things, it has been debased, abused, and distorted
since the Fall.

One of the ways in which
sexuality has been abused is by idolising it, by turning it into a
little god, and then claiming that anything and everything that impedes
or hinders the acting on any sexual urge is bad. For Christians, such a
belief is an error, as is the opposite error (propounded by many
Gnostics) that sexuality and sexual urges are bad in themselves.

For this reason Orthodox
Christians practise fasting on certain days and seasons, restraining not
just sexual urges, but restraining other bodily appetites as well.
Fasting is, of course, primarily the abstention from food, or certain
kinds of food. According to Genesis 3, it was failure to abstain from
certain kinds of food that led to the Fall in the first place.

In addition to saying that a man
leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, our Lord Jesus
Christ also said that “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are
given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven” (Matt 22:30). And
so there are those whom God calls to forgo the blessings of marriage,
and to live the angelic life on earth. And this too is a witness; a
witness that we do not need to be slaves to our bodily desires, that sex
or food are not the last word in human fulfilment.

Thus for Orthodox Christians
marriage and monasticism go together. Marriage and monasticism are two
different ways of manifesting the mystery of our communion with Christ.

As one monk put it, the
monasteries are the lungs of the church. The world is enemy-occupied
territory, enveloped in a mantle of pollution. But Christ did not come
into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him
might be saved. But in order to participate in that work of salvation
the Church needs to be able to breathe the pure air of heaven, and so we
need monasteries as the lungs. But we also need to descend into the
muck and pollution in order to be able to participate in Christ’s saving
work.

In both of these ways, however,
we cannot expect unbroken success in this world. Some marriages fail,
and end in divorce. Some that do not end in divorce are nonetheless
marred by the adultery of one or both partners, or by violence or
cruelty. As Schmemann (1982:89) puts it,

This is what the marriage
crowns express: that here is the beginning of a small kingdom which can
be something like the true Kingdom. The chance will be lost, perhaps
even in one night; but at this moment it is still an open possibility.
Yet even when it has been lost, and lost again a thousand times, still
if two people stay together, they are in a real sense king and queen to
each other. And after forty odd years, Adam can still turn and see Eve
standing beside him, in a unity with himself that in some small way at
least proclaims the love of God’s Kingdom.

And so too with monasteries. One
monk said that monastic life was not for the faint-hearted, because
more people went to hell from monasteries than from anywhere else. It
was so easy for a monk to lose his nipsis (watchfulness) and to fall
into sin.

3 Legal and social dimensions of marriage

It should be clear by now that
in the Orthodox view marriage is not primarily a legal contract, and the
ontological and sacramental meaning is far more significant.
Nevertheless, marriage does have legal and social dimensions, and these
may or may not be compatible with the Church’s understanding of
marriage.

3.1 The social dimension of marriage

The sacramental dimension of
marriage is not something that the Orthodox Church would wish those who
are not members of the Church to follow, though there have at times been
problems with this. In the past, for example, the Greek government
would not recognise the marriage of Greek citizens unless it was
performed by an Orthodox priest, even if both were atheists.

But natural marriage is
something given by God to the whole human race. It may be fallen, but
even in its damaged form it can, through human love, reflect something
of God’s love.

In South Africa, however, this
natural marriage suffered almost irreparable damage from the ideology of
apartheid and its implementation. Migratory labour and influx control
meant that in many areas 90 percent of first babies were born to
unmarried mothers. And the effects are felt even today, years after the
end of apartheid. A large proportion of those coming to baptism from
non-Orthodox families do not know who their fathers were. Even from the
point of view of African traditional religion, they cannot venerate
their ancestors, because they have no idea who those ancestors were.
Thus the very concept of marriage is alien to many people in our
country.

3.2 The legal dimension of marriage

The Constitutional Court of
South Africa found in Minister of Home Affairs vs Fourie & Bonthuys
(CCT 60/04) that by restricting marriage to couples of different sexes,
the Marriage Act and the common law definition of marriage infringed the
constitutional rights of those who wished to marry someone of the same
sex.

In its judgement the Court
referred to Discussion Paper 104 of the South African Law Reform
Commission (SALRC), which had suggested three possible alternatives:

1. Amending the Common Law definition of marriage and the Marriage Act to include same-sex couples.

2. Separating
the civil and religious elements of marriage so that the Marriage Act
will only regulate the civil aspects of marriage.

3. Providing a “marriage-like” alternative of civil unions with the same legal consequences of marriage.

Before being heard in the
Constitutional Court the matter was heard in the Supreme Court of Appeal
(SCA), where Farlam JA pointed out, in a minority judgement, that in
the Roman Empire marriage was not a concern of the State at all and even
after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire
this did not change.

One way of avoiding the
difficulties arising from conflicting understandings of marriage might
be to combine proposals 2 and 3 of the South African Law Reform
commission in the light of the observations of Farlam JA and repeal the
Marriage Act altogether, and for marriage to cease to be a concern of
the State.

As the State registers
commercial partnerships, it could replace the Marriage Act with
legislation for the registration of social and domestic partnerships,
which could include, but not be limited to marriage, regardless of what
form such partnerships might take. Such partnerships could have similar
legal consequences to those of marriage today, and clarify the legal
rights and responsibilities of partners (I have said more about this
here: Notes from underground: The State should get out of the marriage
business).

4 Conclusion

The Orthodox Church believes
that marriage is intrinsically and ontologically based on the union of
two human beings, one male and the other female. Though this has become
distorted in human society as a result of the fall, the aim of Christian
sacramental marriage is to express and make present the promise of its
restoration. Natural marriage has the potential of being restored in
this way, as shown in the dual rite of Betrothal and Crowning.

There is, however, no way that a
“marriage” between two persons of the same sex can be seen in this way.
In the view of the Church such a union is not a marriage at all.

5 Bibliography

Schmemann, Alexander. 1982. For the life of the world: sacraments and Orthodoxy. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

[1]
In this paper I refer to “homosexual marriage”, and not “gay marriage”.
While “homosexual” can refer to sexual orientation, in the phrase
“homosexual marriage” it refers to the sex of the parties, whereas “gay”
in this context refers to sexual orientation. While in Orthodox
theology there can be no such thing as homosexual marriage, there is no
legal or theological obstacle to gay marriage, and I know of no country
where there has been. A gay person can marry someone of the opposite
sex, who may or may not themselves be gay, and that has often happened.

[2]
English-speaking Orthodox Christians are also uneasy about the current
trend to use the word “man” to refer exclusively to male persons. There
is no other word in English that expresses the notion of the human
person in community. Most other languages have two words where English
has only one. Greek has anthropos and aner, Zulu has umuntu and indoda,
Russian has chelovek and muzhchina; but English has to make do with man
and man for both meanings. The worldview of Western individualism means
that Western people feel no loss in this, but it goes against Orthodox
anthropology, which makes a distinction between the individual and the
person. The individual is isolated, a person is in community and
relationship with others and with God. Some recent translations have
fallen into this error. One translation of the Symbol of Faith has
changed “for us men and our salvation” to “for us and for our
salvation”. The omission of tous anthropous is at least as great an
error as the addition of the Filioque and opens the way to interpreting
it as “for us Greeks and our salvation” (or Serbs, or Russians, or any
other ethnic group one happens to belong to).